The Carnival at Bray

by Jessie Ann Foley

  Maggie and Eoin followed the chaotic exodus out of the arena and were caught at a bottleneck crush of fans near the exit. Maggie lifted her chin to breathe and clung to Eoin’s hand. It had begun to rain again. People stomped, shoved, shouted in Mediterranean languages. Police barked unintelligible orders from megaphones, and finally, there was a great push of bodies, and they stumbled free into the parking lot, which was lit up by the miles of headlights from cars streaming out of the parking lot and back to real life.

  “Where do we go for the shuttle?” Eoin shouted over the crowd.

  “I don’t know!”

  The lawn in front of the Palaghiaccio was slick with mud, and people were sliding through it on their bare bellies. They stopped a security guard to ask for help, but he didn’t speak English. Neither did anyone else they asked. The buses began to crawl out of the parking lot one by one.

  “Shuttle? Termini?” Eoin asked random people, but the hordes of drunken fans just grinned at him and shrugged, rambling off into the night. Just as they were about to give up and spend the rest of their money on a taxi back to the city, Maggie saw, in the darkness, the white-blond hair of the tattooed Norwegians.

  “American!” called one of them, waving at her. She wore jeans so shredded they clung to her long legs by a few patches of fraying white thread. Maggie grabbed Eoin’s sleeve.

  “Those are the girls I met in the bathroom of our hotel,” she said. “They speak English!”

  “What did you think of our Kurt?” asked the woman in the torn jeans. “Wasn’t he magnificent?”

  “I can die happy now,” said the man she was with, who came up behind her and put his big hands around her waist. He had cropped white hair and a metal bar through his nose.

  “We’re looking for the shuttle,” Eoin explained. “Do you know how to get back to Termini?”

  “The shuttle? Who needs this shuttle?” laughed the man. “We can take you anywhere you want!”

  Maggie looked over at Eoin. He shrugged and gave her a look that said, why not?

  The Norwegians’ Volkswagen van was painted black—even the windows—and inside, all the seats had been ripped out. The floor was covered in dirty red shag carpet. Maggie and Eoin sat down against the back door while the rest of the Norwegians crammed in after them, sitting cross-legged around the perimeter of the van. The man with the bar through his nose gunned the engine so that Maggie could feel it hum beneath her butt. After they were on their way, the In Utero girl, who introduced herself as Bente, lifted a corner of the shag rug and produced a small baggie of white powder. She sniffed delicately from the small scoop of her black-painted pinkie nail, passed it to the girl in the torn jeans, then leaned her head back and let the cocaine drift up her aquiline nose. Maggie felt queasy. She wanted to tell them to stop, that they were all going to die, that they were too beautiful and young to snort drugs up the collapsing vessels of their pretty noses. But what was the point? This is what people did at rock shows, and probably what they had always done. She and Eoin sat together and watched. Bente offered the coke to Eoin first and he declined, mildly, in that judgeless way of his, able to say no without sounding prudish. She held it out to Maggie next, who waved the drugs away with a polite shaking of her head. Bente shrugged, and passed the bag down the line, leaving Maggie wondering: If Eoin had accepted the drugs, what would she have done? And if Bente had offered them to her first, what would she have said?

  “We’re going to a party on the other side of the city,” Bente explained. “Do you want us to drop you off somewhere?”

  “How about the Coliseum?” Eoin said.

  The driver with the bar through his nose, whose name was Luther, screeched to a halt a short while later in front of Rome’s most famous ruin. It stood, gaping, half-crumbled and half-perfect, seeming to have burst forth from the past, a fist through the earth of this magic city. They waved good-bye to the Norwegians and stood in the shadow of a wall that had once held lions and warriors, people so long dead that no one had missed them in a thousand years. A moon, white and round as a Communion wafer, hung in the sky and glowed through the hundreds of empty arches. All around them, cars sped by, honking and swerving. Tourist-trap restaurants blinked with specials for pizza and gelato, but all of these modern distractions seemed as flimsy as cardboard. The moonlit air felt weighted with history.

  “It makes me feel so small,” Maggie said. “Well, not me. But my life. You know?” Eoin nodded, but he did not quite seem to be listening. He stared up for a while, then turned away from the enormous ruin to find her eyes.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” She tucked her hair behind her ear self-consciously, suddenly shy.

  “I love you, Maggie,” Eoin said. He held his hands out to her, palms up, a defenseless, surprised gesture. “I mean, I really love you.”

  “And I love you.” She grasped his outstretched hands. It was as true and simple a thing as she’d ever said. She was glad he’d said it first, though, because she knew that she never would have, and the very act of saying it had made it even truer. Somewhere above them, a low peal of thunder rumbled and a fork of white lightning threaded the sky. He kissed her so hard that her back scraped up against the cold, ancient stone, as if the past was pushing back at her, as the past does. The rain began to fall then, and cold drops slithered down the back of her neck. She slipped out of Eoin’s arms and untied Kevin’s flannel shirt from around her waist. Reaching up, she knotted it around one of the metal bars that surrounded the ground-level arches.

  “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “Didn’t the Romans leave, like, offerings to the gods?”

  “Are we pagans now? Dan Sean would not approve.”

  “No. But the thing is, I don’t need it anymore.” Maggie stepped back and put her head on the wet curve of Eoin’s shoulder. They stood in the rain and watched the shirt tail spin gently in the wind. “I was surprised,” she murmured, “as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt.” It was a prayer, she knew, that Kevin would understand.

  Back at the hotel, rain drummed against the wooden shutters. The soft beam of streetlight from Piazza Farnese filtered in through the slats as Maggie and Eoin lay down on the little twin bed with its faded, starched sheets and thin quilts. His eyes hovered over her collarbone and he was peeling off her wet black dress. She was totally and completely unafraid. She tugged at his sweatshirt and pulled it over his head. This wasn’t something he was doing to her, or even something they were doing together. They were making something, or beginning something, or finishing something. Her bra fell away to the linoleum floor, his pants were kicked to the end of the bed, and the rain shook the shutters. He moved on top of her and their lives became this moment, contained in the sheets, something that no one else would ever know, a secret to keep forever, the feeling of him inside of her. Afterwards, as they lay together, their heartbeats returning to normal, they heard the Norwegians returning from their party, drunk and crashing down the hall, singing “Pennyroyal Tea,” while outside were the mazes of streets and tangles of parked mopeds, ancient temples and fading frescoes. Rome was under their nails, in their hair, and Maggie knew that when they awoke, they would never be able to wash it out: and that even if they could, they would never want to.

  Early the next dawn, just as the sun broke through the dome of smog that blanketed Rome, Maggie awoke, naked and spooned in the warm crescent of Eoin’s body, to a pounding on her door.

  “Carbinieri!” A voice yelled from the other side of the door. “Police!”

  Eoin jolted awake beside her.

  “What in the name of—” He sat up, reaching blearily for his underwear. A reedy, familiar voice floated from the other side of the door.

  “Maggie, please!”

  It was her mother.

  They were fully awake now, diving around the room, gathering and pulling on their clothes. The tiny space smelled of sweat and a palpable scent that Maggie was sure her mother would recognize
. She had smelled it in Laura and Colm’s room on many mornings after the bed had creaked and moaned.

  Dressed, she took a deep breath and looked back at Eoin who was sitting, eyes wide, at the edge of the bed. She opened the door. There was her mother, travel worn and baggy eyed, Colm, smoldering and silent, and two police officers. Laura yanked Maggie’s arm and pulled her into a rough, sobbing hug. The men looked away from her noisy crying. Dust motes helicoptered in the bars of sunlight that filtered from the cracks in the shutters.

  She held Maggie against her chest, then pushed her away.

  “You goddamn little fool,” she bawled. She reached up and slapped Maggie across the face, hard, so that the dust skittered away, and for a moment, the room was filled with the pure, harsh light of a cold Roman sun.

  Kiss

  The mouth

  Which tells you, here,

  Here is the world.

  —Galway Kinnell, “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight”

  They drove to Saint Brigid’s in silence. Maggie was grateful for the pinging rain and the slap of the windshield wipers that cut through the quiet as Colm’s old van splashed through the foggy streets and pulled into the car park. Morning classes had begun, and Maggie was sure she could feel the eyes of the girls in the second-floor classrooms staring down at the top of her umbrella, whispering about the American girl who broke the rules of comportment, ran away to the Continent with a boy, and was now going to get expelled for it. Girls who got kicked out of Saint Brigid’s were marked for life. It wasn’t the cool kind of rebellious, the kind that showed you knew how to dance on the edge of the line without crossing it, like cursing within earshot of a teacher or punching little hoops of silver through the cartilage of your ears or showing up to school on Monday with a hickey on your neck. Expulsion destroyed your reputation utterly. Maggie almost felt sorry for Aíne Keogh, who had probably worked herself into a tizzy, hoping that none of the other honors girls would remember that for a brief period during fall term, she and Maggie Lynch had been friends.

  Laura had gone to Penneys the night before and bought an outfit especially for the hearing: a pair of black slacks and a conservative gray blouse that gapped at the buttons, straining over her large breasts. The cheap sateen material of the blouse creased along the back and arms from where it had been folded on the store shelf, making Laura look exactly like what she was trying not to look like: a blue-collar woman putting on airs, a nervous plaintiff on court TV.

  “Let me do the talking,” she said now, opening the heavy wooden door at the school entrance. “If there’s one thing I learned when I was in high school, it’s how to tangle with a nun.”

  The meeting was held in a small conference room with cracked leather chairs, a long mahogany table, and stone statues of Saint Emily, Saint Brigid, Saint Veronica, and Saint Anne standing guard in each corner. Outside, rain dripped from the heavy eaves of the courtyard trees.

  Sister Joan, the principal, was the first to enter. She carried a file folder with Maggie’s name on it, and her face, which protruded from the starched black folds of her wimple, had the exact shape and texture of a cabbage. She was followed into the room by Sister Geneve, the faculty representative. Maggie didn’t know whether Sister Geneve was on her side, but she felt calmed by the presence of her teacher, whose heavy cabled cardigan, shapeless trousers, and white, tufty hair lent her a gentle, grandmotherly air that contrasted with Sister Joan and her stiff judge’s robes.

  “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Lynch,” said Sister Joan, extending a hand to Laura, whose smart, self-possessed march through the linoleum halls in her new clothes and sensible black pumps had immediately crumbled in the principal’s presence. Maggie remembered her mother telling her that when she was a high school student at Holy Redeemer in the 1970s, the Blessed Virgin Mary nuns—Big Vicious Mamas, she’d redubbed them—used to pick on her, and that once, in sophomore-year geometry class, a fat Canadian transplant named Sister Edward had shoved Laura right out of her desk and into a bookcase for waving out the window at a pair of sailors who were crossing Sheridan Road. Sister Edward and the other Big Vicious Mamas must’ve detected Laura Lynch’s barely concealed vitality—the full lips, the dreamy gaze—and foreseen her fate: pregnant before her teenage years were up, abandoned a few years later without a ring on her finger or a dress of yellowing lace shoved to the back recesses of her closet. And now she had to stand before another pair of Big Vicious Mamas to defend the product of her shame, her dark-haired daughter, for behaving in much the same way.

  “Hi,” Laura shook Sister Joan’s hand limply, ducking her head and looking much like a girl herself.

  “Please,” Sister Geneve said, indicating two of the leather chairs, “sit down.”

  They took their places around the empty table.

  “The purpose of this hearing today is to discuss whether Saint Brigid’s is the right place for Margaret as she continues her secondary studies,” Sister Joan said. She opened the file folder and began to read. “Margaret has missed a week of classes, and because all of these absences were cuts, she is not allowed to make up any of the work. As a result, she is failing several of her courses. That is the first issue. The second is Margaret’s conduct while absent. It’s our understanding that your daughter went, unaccompanied, to Italy with a student from Saint Brendan’s. She shared sleeping arrangements with this boy for several nights.” Sister Joan peered over the rim of her bifocals at Maggie.

  “Margaret, it may seem unfair to you that we are going to be talking about your conduct outside of school when deciding whether to keep you as a student here. But at Saint Brigid’s, character is just as important as academics—far more important, actually—and we have to think about what it will mean for the climate of our school if we allow you to remain a student here after some of the choices you’ve made over the past few days. What message will that be sending the other girls, the underclass girls? Now, Sister Geneve and I are not here to hear your confession—that is the business of yourself, your family, and God. What we are here today to do is give you the opportunity to tell your side of the story, to help us understand why you should remain a student here. To speak plainly, your job today is to convince us that we should not expel you.”

  Maggie nodded. Under the table, her mother groped for her hand and held it tightly.

  “To be clear, Maggie,” Sister Geneve added softly, “we want you to be a Saint Brigid’s girl. This is your chance to tell us why you deserve to stay. It’s not meant to feel like an inquisition.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sisters, before we start, I do want to tell you a little bit about our family situation,” Laura began in a quaking voice. “I’m not trying to make excuses or nothing, but I just think maybe if you knew what Maggie’s gone through over the past couple months …” She trailed off. Laura was a career bartender, used to getting her way by flirting, sweet-talking, wisecracking, or, when all else failed, handing out a complimentary shot. Here, all of her reliable tricks were powerless. While she looked to the ceiling beams for inspiration, Sister Geneve began picking at a loose thread at the cuff of her sweater and Sister Joan regarded her without expression from between the folds of her wimple. “My little brother died suddenly over the Christmas holidays,” she finally continued. “Maggie was his goddaughter. They were very close. He committed suicide on New Year’s Day, back in Chicago. I didn’t want Maggie to know—it was so awful—so I told her he’d died of natural causes.”

  “Natural causes?” Sister Joan wrote something in Maggie’s file.

  “Yeah. See, he had a bum heart. A congenital defect. So I thought she’d believe it. I wanted to believe it myself, you know?” Laura paused now to reach into her purse and produce a balled up tissue. She honked into it while Maggie looked away, staring fiercely into the blank, stony face of Saint Anne.

  “So, you lied to her?” Sister Geneve’s voice had a delicate, neutral quality that didn’t need to be judgmental in order to m
ake its point. Maggie had seen her walk down the hallway before the opening bell and say nothing more than “Good morning,” leaving in her wake a sea of upper-class girls who unrolled their skirts back to the required length of an inch above the knee and went sheepishly off to class.

  “I don’t know whether that was the right thing to do,” Laura said quickly. Maggie could see the tiny crescents of sweat soaking the cheap material under her mother’s armpits. “I don’t like lying. I know that lying is a sin. But I wanted to protect my daughter from—I mean, Kevin was Maggie’s hero. An uncle, a brother, a father and a best friend all wrapped into one. We all loved him so much. He was crazy and funny and he read all these books, you know, these big four-hundred-pagers with tiny print … he was just this—force.

  “But like you said, this isn’t an inquisition. I did what I did and that’s that. The thing is, Kevin gave Maggie those Nirvana tickets. So going to Rome—for her, it was about a lot more than just a stupid concert.” She took a breath. The crescents of sweat were now seeping into full moons beneath her arms.

  “My point is, she’s a good kid, okay? And she’s been through a lot this year. I mean, if you were gonna expel every teenager who did something stupid, who would you have left? Maybe the valedictorian and a couple kids from the chess team?” She tried a laugh, which echoed emptily off the plaster walls of the sparse room.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Lynch,” said Sister Joan. “And you too, Margaret. Grief can be its own temporary form of insanity. How we handle our suffering speaks to our character as well. Margaret, do you have anything you’d like to add?”

  Maggie looked up from her lap at the two nuns who sat and waited for her to say something.